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The day this issue hits the streets this week is Junior's 18th birthday, if you can believe it. The Observer surely can't. All the long years we've known that baby and boy and now man have slipped past in less time, it seemed, than it takes to wipe a tear from the cheek.

If you've watched this space for the past 16 years or so, you've seen that child grow up before your eyes, or at least in your imagination. The Observer, who often goes to the well of our own experience when we're hurting for an offering to leave on the altar of Great God of All Journalists Phil D. Hole, has often fallen back on Junior's trials, turmoil and tribulations to gin up column inches over the years. Fatherhood — which we came to with a nervousness and sense of apprehension that still hasn't fled — has been good for Yours Truly, at least career-wise.

His Dear Pa both envies him and fears for him here on the doorstep of adulthood, for the same reason: The road in front of him is so much longer at this point than it is for his old man, so full of bends and long straightaways, so much intrigue and sorrow, days and nights full of ... who can say? We have tried, in our clumsy way, to instill in him both the things we wish we'd known and the hard lessons visited upon us: that women are no more or less strong, capable, fragile or ethical than men; that he should never be ashamed of a work shirt, but value a nice suit even for occasions other than weddings and funerals; that out of every 10 people, regardless of gender, orientation, religion, cash flow or color, there will be a solid 10 percent you can count on and 30 percent with all the brains God gave a ferret; lefty-loosey, righty-tighty; that he should save his apologies for when he truly screws up and his attempts at justifying bad behavior for God; that money can't buy happiness, but it can buy him time to find it; that he should take care of his teeth, feet and back, because when they're kaput, he'll miss them.

What a thing it has been to be that child's father. The job is not over, of course, not until they lay The Observer in the clay, but you get what we mean. If you don't, maybe you will someday. As we learned soon after Junior — born on the bayou, in Lafayette General Hospital, way down in south Louisiana — came home, they don't give you an instruction manual on your way out the door of the maternity ward. All you've got is that grand old standby: The Best You Damn Well Can. That is what we have tried to do.
When he turned 13, The Observer wrote him a clumsy poem to mark the occasion. It still applies. Happy birthday, Sam. You make your old man proud every day.

No they don't need state help. Any conservative legislator who is true to their tea party principles will crow on about crony capitalism. I look forward to deafening silence.

The Observer is at home today in our kitty cat socks, weathering a combination sick day and snow day. Way down in Stifft Station, we live at the top of a hill that slopes away in all directions. That's good in a flood, but piss poor other than for sledding during snow and ice, especially when you only have access to a two-wheel drive car.

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The Observer, like a lot of folks, is drawn to the real places: barbecue joints and honky-tonks, seedy truck stops and greasy little diners where the waitresses and clerks still call you "Hun," used bookstores that have been there since Faulkner was still drinking mint juleps, bait shops hung with dusty-eyed bass pulled up from the deep when Eisenhower was in the White House.